This Handbook brings together 49 international specialists to address an issue of increasing importance for the world’s post-industrial economies; innovation as it relates to services.

We investigate the mechanisms of knowledge governance and show that the actual economic benefits stemming from knowledge externalities depend on the characteristics of (a) the sources of such externalities, (b) the context in which spillovers take place, (c) the potential users of the...

The paper implements the Schumpeterian notion of creative reaction to articulate and test the hypothesis that the shift to the knowledge economy in advanced economies is the result of the creative reaction of firms, caught in out - of - equilibrium conditions by the fast globalization of product...

The analysis of the characteristics of firms helps understanding the causes and the consequences of the direction of technological change. Firms differ substantially with respect to the type of technological knowledge they can generate and exploit with the introduction of technological...

This paper contributes the economics of knowledge and innovation with the analysis of the knowledge cost function and sheds light on the determinants of the large variance in the cost of innovation across firms. The amount and the structure of external knowledge and the internal stocks of...

The development of knowledge within industries is strongly influenced by the network structure of relations among firms. Firms relying on localized knowledge can implement their technological capability not only by means of research and development expenditures and internal learning but also...

This paper elaborates an integrated framework for understanding diffusion as a process of creative adoptions in the business sector. Within the context of the economics of localized technological change, adoption is viewed as a complementary component of a broader process of adjusting the...

Venture capitalism can be understood as a new mechanism for the governance of technological knowledge that is the result of a system dynamics where a variety of complementary and localized innovations introduced by heterogeneous agents aligned and converged towards a collective platform. The new...

This paper articulates the hypothesis that there is an optimal size of knowledge pools. Too little a density of innovation activities reduces the accessibility of external knowledge. Too large a density enhances congestion and reduces appropriability. Firms can benefit from actual increasing...